I have a questionable design in my hack currently. But it seems to work for better than worse.You're basically running away from a NPC. If the NPC talks to your main lord. GAME OVER.The best part about this is... there is obstruction in your path that you have to clear, and the NPC wouldn't care about it.Not even Enemies can touch the NPC because they'd be dead if they even tried to.All you have to do is reach a certain point to win. I liberally took the idea from Arch's Legault tale, but more focused on escaping tactics.I'm seeing how it's going to work.

My most questionable design decision: adding convergence where it didn't belong.... Yes, I expected this to need explanation.My main project, in its old form, included a chapter wherein you and a bunch of ally (green) units defend a fortress that's under attack. The objective was simply "Survive" and the chapter ended when the commander of the ally units was defeated and the player characters decided to run after that. However, in case the player got the bright idea of using a mounted unit to rescue the commander, the chapter automatically ended after eight turns (the enemy blitzes the commander hard before then so if you do rescue him it's actually pretty hard fending off level ~10 enemies in the front when you're supposed to be in the back fighting the level ~2 ones). I got the bright idea of inserting an Easter egg of sorts for those who had had the gall to defend or rescue the dude for eight long turns.This is where I got carried away.

The next two chapters differed pretty substantially based on whether or not that commander survived until turn 8, with everything being things that would not be affected whatsoever by whether or not he actually died. You got different items from villages, recruited units in a different order, and enemies spawned in different formations. What had seemed like a brilliant, subtle gameplay variation spiraled out of hand to become an arbitrary clusterfuck which only resulted in people asking "why did I get the pegasus knight instead of the mage?" or "how do I get the archer to have the archer-useable dagger instead of the longbow?". To everyone but myself, it seemed random and poorly thought-out, and I didn't realise it until I finally scrapped that version of the project and restarted on a new rom. This time, I allow the player themselves to choose what to do in what order rather than throwing it at them in xyz order based on conditions that have nothing to do with what's being thrown at the player.

zahlman:

The FEditor ROM footer.

I think I may have just been slapped in the wrist by this very thing, actually. I made some innocuous Nightmare changes to my rom, suddenly it was incompatible with FEditor ("thread error" when trying to open or something like that), then I noticed that some bytes at the end of the rom had been changed for some reason. I went and changed them back to what they were and everything works perfectly again.

Then I noticed that some bytes at the end of the rom had been changed for some reason

Nightmare adds four bytes to the end of your rom every time you use it (and also makes an ini file with those four bytes as the title) for some unknown reason. This is why I've resorted to editing in nightmare on a fresh rom and then copy/pasting the tables over.

Nightmare adds four bytes to the end of your rom every time you use it (and also makes an ini file with those four bytes as the title) for some unknown reason. This is why I've resorted to editing in nightmare on a fresh rom and then copy/pasting the tables over.

ooOOOOooh, got it. Good to know!And another enigma is shot down: the fact that my projects' folders become flooded with those .ini files over time. @_@

Why wouldn't nighmare just hash the file before doing anything, then see if there's an ini to load?Well, at least this is useful information. Now I know to get rid of that checksum after I do anything with nightmare, and hopefully FEditor will break less often.

Once I had the idea of copying an idea from Valkyrie Profile DS which battle system is very similar to FE. In it you'll get a feather from the underworld. You can use said feather to strenghten one character per chapter. Its stat will increase immense(like saying from strenght 2 to 20) and let the character easyliy solo the chapter. It also automaticlly fills the sin gauge. The sin gauge is set to a certain value each chapter. You can fill by overkill or activate the feather. The higher you can fill it the higher the better and rarer items you can get. So activating the feather will result in a very high sin gauge, since you get the setted value and extra points for the overkills that the choosen character definitly will make.But the price for all this is the death of that character. The chosed character will die at the end of the chapter so you have to think twice about using the feather. Addtional to that it has an effect on the story. If you use the feather to often you'll get the bad ending in which the main character is totally possed by the power of the feather and doesn't care about everything else.

This in mind I was thinking of a simliar system. You could get an item like the feather which will make the unit so op that it breakes the game (The enemies have to be much harder to beat in order to make it more attractiv.). After the chapter the unit dies und you can never use it again. Also it should effect the dialogue, the story and the ending. But I think I would never use such a system since it's to hard to make such an item or count how many times you use it.